Granbloobloo versus

To say I came into the Granblue Fantasy Versus beta with a lot of scepticism would be an understatement. I dislike majority of ArcSys games and this one seemed to lean closer to the end of their spectrum that is least appealing to me, with Guilty Gear-style graphics and tempo. At the same time it promised to be significantly less complex and less demanding of knowledge and controller proficiency than their staple franchise, but that doesn’t really make the pitch any better. Moreover, a lot of the messaging from producers was further discouraging - talk of making the game simpler so that it can be “less about combos and more about strategic” and  “more accessible” and constantly prattling about esports set off all my red flags. And the nail the in the coffin - the cooldown system restricting the use of specials in a variety of ways is something that fighting games have experimented with before (Rising Thunder, League of Fighters), but in general it just doesn’t seem like a good idea. So with that entire premise, how’s GBFV?

It’s ok.

The End of Star

Last week marked the end of Star vs The Forces of Evil, already one of my favorite shows of this decade. I’ve explained what I like about it once before, but let this serve as a short addendum now that we know where the story went and how it all ended. Slightly muddled spoilers ahead (but spoilers nevertheless, including the final episode).

Boback Horseperson: 5th strike

As I was watching the final scene of Bojack Horseman season 5, with Diane riding into the sunset, I was pretty underwhelmed. While the season had some great comedy and observations, it seemingly lacked an emotional narrative hook and as a result left me with no particular lasting impression. For a few days after having finished watching my feelings about the show didn’t change much.

And then I started thinking about it.

Kaguya wants to be confessed to

It feels inevitable to bring up “Death Note” when describing “Kaguya-Sama: Love is War”, so let me just do it right away - this is a parody of romantic comedies where neither of the two main characters wants to admit they’re into each other, so instead they get into a ridiculous battle of minds trying to get the other to fess up, indeed resembling those L and Kira had.

Nozomi and the blue girl

As someone familiar with the Hibike Euphonium TV show and roughly aware of what happens in the original books it’s based on, I wasn’t sure why the first standalone movie in the franchise would focus on Nozomi Kasaki and Mizore Yoroizuka. For starters, I thought their story was already told - first introduced in the beginning of season two, they seemingly had an issue with one another concerning something that happened a year earlier, but less than halfway through it turned out to be a misunderstanding, they start talking again and we get the good ending. Chapter closed, lived happily ever after, move on?

Top 10 Albums of 2018

HELLOHI ohmygosh, I’ve never commited to anything as much as to my album-of-the-year lists. Wow. Three years in a row. That’s CRAZY.

Looking back on 2017 list I realize it may have been one of my favorite years in music ever. Not only do I absolutely adore and constantly revisit the top10 I’ve made, but there’s also a couple of fantastic albums I either completely missed (Manchester Orchestra’s “A black mile to the surface”, Ola Kvernberg’s “Steamdome”) or way undervalued (Roger Waters’ “Deja Vu”, Polkadot Stingray’s “Zenchizennō”). If I were to make a top10 list of 2017+2018, let’s just say it wouldn’t be very different from last year’s. Anyway I’m just thinking of what to put in the intro when I should be just getting straight into albums. So without further ado, I present my 2018 top10 albums of the year.

Persona 5

I decided to play Persona 5 on hard difficulty, because of my conviction that by and large, this is the mode that provides the adequate amount of challenge in vast majority of modern titles, and for the most part I've enjoyed my journey. Tough opponents not only forced me to optimize my tactics in boss battles, which became like puzzles with precise and detailed solutions, but I've also had to consider HP and SP as resources that determined how far into the dungeon I can go, while simultaneously I needed to gain experience and farm money for better equipment, and do it fast enough to be able to finish my mission before the deadline. This sort of nagging feeling that I'm running out of time and have to be smart about how I use it was probably the main attraction of the game for me. But heading towards the 150 hour mark, it started to get ridiculous. The enemies were only getting stronger and stronger and I didn't even have the option to grind because I would simply deplete my life and energy and be forced to return to the real world, wasting a day of Mr Protag's life without making progress. It got to the point where I've had to carefully plan every single encounter on my way - which team members I run, which Persona I use, and the exact order of actions I will take to preserve enough resources to last me until the next save point. I've had to defeat the "final boss" by using a ludicrous cheese strategy - using a Persona that repelled physical damage, planning how I use each healing and resurrecting item as well as buffing and debuffing spells, remembering the common order of my opponent’s spell usage so that I can select right Persona each turn, and hoping that RNG goes a little my way and makes the Boss choose his Physical attack as often as possible. And finally, I did it. But of course this was only the "final boss", and there was actually another 20-30 hour section of the game awaiting me. And of course that had its own difficulty bump, which meant that I would have to continue my dance of remembering the order of opponents and strategizing against each one of them for something like 100 more fights. Or just grind, because at that point I got access to free replenishing of HP/SP and there was no deadline. After 5 hours of banging my head against the wall I desperately checked the settings to find out that, luckily, the title does have an option to change the difficulty mid-game. I immediately lowered it to easy and breezed through the rest of the game feeling like I was on some debug cheats, with no satisfaction to speak of.